Nonprofit group cleans up unruly government data for everyone else

Government numbers can be tough to wrap the head around. For the last two years California Common Sense (CACS) has been putting a lot of public data into nice visuals for people to tinker with — but hasn’t been able to really put that information — the raw metrics — in people’s hands.

Now the non-partisan non-profit is opening aggregated government and public data to users so they can download and manipulate the numbers themselves. The idea is that if, say, a student is working on a social studies project on prison rates or a parent had been trying to understand nearby public school spending, now they can tweak the numbers to answer their exact question.

“We haven’t had an effective enough mechanism for users to use that data themselves,” says Autumn Carter, executive director of CACS. She believes making such info available “allows for more people to join the civic table and promote effective governance.”

Tableau is the other company helping envision data, like campaign donors in California

CACS had been using data visualizer Tableau to make the previous data more understandable with graphs and charts. Now it is employing data organizer Socrata to help users manipulate the raw data. Both companies are based in Seattle.

Governments, big and small, have come under increasing pressure to open up with data to the public. The idea is that with more people being able to vet what elected officials are up to, the better informed we’ll be as a democracy.

Carter says that the group will continue aggregating new data sets, examining higher education statistics, like where tuitions are being spent across the college systems. Breaking down types of violent crimes in California is another upcoming project.

CACS was started by a group of Stanford students looking at ways to help in government. “We wanted to be more involved but couldn’t because of a lack of transparency,” Carter says.